|
The comparison is to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, and there's William Cameron Menzies to augment the baroque hysteria. "What this country needs is a slow, elegant death." France, 1794, on the verge of dictatorship with Robespierre (Richard Basehart), "a fanatic with powdered wig and twisted mind." The death list with everybody's name on it is just the MacGuffin for the vortex of fear, the vicious prosecutor summoned to Paris is really an undercover patriot (Robert Cummings). "We're living in a perpetual state of violence," Anthony Mann wouldn't want it any other way. History both distant and recent is a matter of gangs, Barras (Richard Hart) is in hiding and Saint-Just (Jess Barker) is chief thug, Hitler's shadow hangs above all. The bakery is a front for the tyrant's headquarters, the hard verticals of bayonet rifles lined on walls contrasts sharply with the broken flesh of a tortured prisoner. Overworked guillotine, candles and torches, "plot as old as Caesar." The heroine (Arlene Dahl) still has faith in the Revolution, the cadaverous chief of secret police (Arnold Moss) prefers his loyalties fluid. Mann's painterly virtuosity offers multiple planes of chiaroscuro, splendid frenzies in tight compositions, faces in rigid profile when not thrusting at the camera. Escape to the farm house, exceptional tension around a grandmother rather nostalgic for the old regime (Beulah Bondi), unruly grandchildren and the little black book under the pillow. "Shut his mouth," a bullet curtails Robespierre's eloquence in a smear of blood and powder. A ferocious, sustained inspiration with John Alton on sets left over from Fleming's Joan of Arc. "Ça ira," sings the mob, the departure from the incendiary landscape reappears in The Fall of the Roman Empire (and Russell's The Devils). With Norman Lloyd, Charles McGraw, Dabbs Greer, Dan Seymour, and Russ Tamblyn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |